Bicycling

How Will You Use Bike-Share? New Trip Planner Lets You Find Out

Pretty much anywhere you go within the bike-share service area, you'll be within a few blocks of a bike-share station. There's probably a station around the corner from your office. Odds are, it'll be a boon for any of those tricky diagonal trips that aren't well-served by the subway.

By Noah Kazis

4:45 PM EDT on May 18, 2012

Pretty much anywhere you go within the bike-share service area, you’ll be within a few blocks of a bike-share station. There’s probably a station around the corner from your office. Odds are, it’ll be a boon for any of those tricky diagonal trips that aren’t well-served by the subway.

To find out exactly how long it’ll take to get around New York on bike-share, there’s now a new online tool: CiBi.me (disclosure: the site was designed by OpenPlans, Streetsblog’s parent organization). Plug in your origin and destination and the site will identify the nearest bike-share stations and map you a route between them. A triangular slider lets riders prioritize faster, flatter, or safer routes.

I played around with the site this afternoon and I’m increasingly convinced that bike-share is going to transform the way New Yorkers get around. You can’t beat the train for a trip straight up Eighth Avenue, but for many trips, bike-share is going to be the go-to way to get from A to B. A trip from the middle of Stuy Town to Penn Station, shown above, would take only 16 minutes, according to the site.

Play around with the site and let us know: For the trips you take regularly, will bike-share come out on top?

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.

Bicycling | Bike Sharing

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